Archive for the ‘Hitwise’ Category

Twitter Tweets Per Day Spike

September 27, 2009

This past week, Twitter announced they were receiving a $100 million investment from both existing investors and some new ones.

Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer wrote a post suggesting Twitter’s traffic may have already peaked and leveled out.

Indeed, several online audience measurement services have suggested for a month or longer that Twitter new visitor traffic and existing traffic retention may have already peaked.

However, last week Twitter announced a new partnership with AOL’s AIM instant messaging service that may have impacted Twitter’s daily Tweet volume which appears to more than doubled at least according to GigaTweet.

Tweets Per Day

Tweets Per Day

I commented on the Hitwise blog about the apparent spike in traffic and Hitwise has chosen not to add my comments.

This isn’t the first time analyst Tancer hasn’t posted my comments.

The last time was when MySpace downstream referrals indicated they would be an attractive take over target – which they became when News Corp. bought them.

Regardless of whether a commenter is right or wrong, Hitwise’s Bill Tancer is the only blogger who’s blog I have commented on who won’t post an opionion contrary to his own.

I wonder why?

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Top 50 Riskiest Search Terms

June 10, 2009

Security firm McAfee has released its list of the top 50 riskiest search terms most likely to lead to searchers to malware or virus spawning websites.

Top 50 Riskiest Search Terms

Top 50 Riskiest Search Terms

How McAfee conducted its study:

McAfee analyzed the first five search results pages across 2,600 popular keywords across the most popular search engines. Both organic and paid listings were incorporated into the analysis, and more than 413,000 unique URLs were checked for potential risk.

According to McAfee:

Work from home searches can be as much as four time more risky than the average for all popular terms. And on average, these searches are 50% more risky than other popular terms.

Work From Home Search Terms and Risk

Work From Home Search Terms and Risk

With the current economic crisis affecting millions of people, work from home searches appear likely to produce more malware and virus problems for the people least equipped to deal with additional burdens – the unemployed.

Search Market Opportunity: Laggards?

May 17, 2009

Hitwise has an interesting post on year over year search referrals for 15 industry categories.

From Hitwise:

For the majority of categories measured at Hitwise, search is the top source of traffic referrals and the share has increased year-over-year. Overall, search is increasing as a traffic driver. Among the parent categories that received less than 25% of traffic from search in April 2008, all except News & Media received a higher share of search referrals last month.

2008 Search Referred Traffic vs. 2009 by Industry

Share of Search Referred Traffic by Industry

Share of Search Referred Traffic by Industry

Hitwise Search Analyst Heather Dougherty suggests the data indicates growth opportunities remain in industries were search hasn’t yet been exploited fully as a referral tool.

According to Dougherty, laggard categories who have yet to capitalize on search referrals are the Automotive, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Gambling, News & Media, Business & Finance and Sports industries.

Could it be the businesses who haven’t yet capitalized on search as a referral mechanism haven’t clearly identified how an increased search engine presence will translate directly into increased revenues for their respective industries?